Exhibitions of Sheila Rock at Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST

"Fashion evokes a transient universe of stylishness and fantasy . Like the floating world in Japan, my photographs offer a sensory provocation that is forever changing." Sheila Rock
Like the fashion world, fashion photography is diverse and reinvents itself again and again, by expressing poetry and coolness, glamor and provocation.
Sheila Rock, an internationally famous and multi-talented photographer, has had solo exhibitions all over the world. Her pers…

It is the year 1969: In the French Church of St. Moritz, Herbert von Karajan, then Chief Conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker, conducts Arthur Honegger's Symphony no. 2. The exact circumstances of the concert are not known. The only thing that remains is the silence. Robert Lebeck has sculpted them on a minimalist composition of light and shadow. But each before and after is cut off: only the genius and the great silence; the moment between two sentences, between two bars or two notes. …

Love loves small things. Love doesn't seek big pathos or emphasis. Love hides in the profane; in the shiny shoes in which one has journeyed or in the perfect fold of a beautiful dress. The really big things often lurk in the smallest of details. "I believe," the American poet Walt Whitman once wrote, "a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars." It is a poetry of dignity and nuance. This is a credo about the interplay of all things and the reverberati…

There is no photography. There is always only the photograph which gazes back at the viewer. Sometimes with a careful, tentative and questioning look; sometimes with a brisk or hasty glance. But it always offers something: an invitation to brief conversations. The viewer always looks, and the photograph, full of curiosity, gazes back. As in 1966, when the German reportage photographer Robert Lebeck took a portrait of the former German chancellor Konrad Adenauer at his 90th birthday celebration …

All water is a parable. It has depth and breadth; it has calm and tumult. It appears to reflect all ambiguities. Even in antiquity it was referred to as the basis of life: "Everything from water, and to water everything returns," said the philosopher Thales of Miletus.
The photographers Sheila Rock and Beat Presser could say the same of water. On June 19th, the Galerie Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST opens the exhibition Seascapes, in which Sheila Rock and Beat Presser toget…

We alone are the insiders of our interior worlds. Within ourselves we feel safe and yet often isolated and sealed off. At the same time, hope is almost always contained therein: evident itself in windows, in the gates of the eyes. Each window is a link, a step between the interior and the exterior. The window functions just as with the lens of a camera - it is the point between the camera obscura and the outside. The point where light breaks through and illuminates another world.
A…

It’s a man’s world. James Brown even sang a song about it. Men were the ones who had invented cars, trains and ships. Men were the born creators. The “King of Soul” failed to mention however that it was also men who invented photography; men, who first created artificial images from light and chemicals. Technically enthusiastic homo faber. It was small wonder that such types initially found themselves mostly behind rather than in front of their new inventions; where the…

Women are a major driving force of photography. No sooner had French pioneer Louis Daguerre introduced the media to the public in 1839 than it began to be used as a method to portray female beauty. It was American chemist John W. Draper who ushered women into photography with a portrait of his sister Dorothy. And ever since, the suspicion has been that a wooing Orpheus lurks behind the cold technology of the camera - an artist whose intentions are to captivate and seduce women with photographs.
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In 1970 exiled Tibetan Monks founded the Buddhist monastery, Sera, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. This monastery furthers the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of one of the "Three Great Monasteries," Sera in Lhasa, the five-hundred-year monastery now under Chinese control. This exiled monastery is a place of shared learning and a place of philosophical and religious debate. It is a place where the highest academic graduates of the monastic university will grow. Monks will study t…